put me in the ground

of late i find myself dreaming of bones, living and dead:

and these days, i am afraid to open my mouth fearing that my ribcage may fall through; i could
never
live down the embarrassment of spilling such    personal things all over my professor’s floor. what would become of my bones' mess spattered there on the linoleum,?—aint no reverence in science; &i could never put em back myself.
their new livid stench would draw forth so strong that vultures'd circle overhead like id been gone for weeks.

gambling

sometimes i catch a faint tendril of your scent—your discarded t-shirt in the bottom of my dresser i keep aiming to wash but never quite do. i open the drawer and

your tan face suddenly glimmers flushed and sharp like a casino’s neon lights rising like knives out of reno coming forward from the cloudless brown desert.

dream a highway

i do not know if the way memory fades like so many tungsten faces is a blessing or curse, only that now it has twighlit some august night just short of the end of days, back when you could smell the girl so ripe in the dusky heat with her sweat dripping like honey to stick
the bees down towards her naked toes sunk deep in the red mud. it is almost enough to know that junipered hillside wont never answer to us again, wont forgive the time our campfire defiled a millenia of sandstone talismans.
the moment dissolves into the shimmering air above the sunbleached miles; the blacktop cleaves the desert driving mercilessly forward, each minute one more distance between that body and this one.

now it's one month later and your lank hair has faded on the pillow of a hazy morning you awoke in agony while i retched up the hangover having crashed up my bike on broadway in some overbrave 3am mania.

sunrise on route nine

there are two motels on route 9, not so far apart but spanning an entire lifetime of mine: i can yet see the green carpet at the hadley inn, us the rapturous and unwashed gazing at the lampshade’s new hole where it hit the floor while the laboror’s pickups idled outside in the dying night.
down the street on the other side of that dream there is a hotel chain’s cheap façade with a window facing the stripmall that caught the sun in my eye so shockingly crystalline that morning with me lain out screaming and screaming on the tile.

FLOOD-new orleans, 2006 (previously published)

The bottles had been underwater long enough to soak the labels off; they were dark and anonymous. We lined them up on the floor next to the mattress we had dragged in and then we lingered in the electricity-free silence for a few minutes. Dead computers surrounded us and their associated hopeful vocabulary—modem ! keyboard! url!—was tacked up on the wall and peeling. Rescued religious statues regarded us from their pile in the corner.
I kept flashing back to the refugees' scrawled notes still on the chalkboards.
R gave me a long look and twisted the cap off. Not a tight seal. He smelled it and brought it to his lips—"a little funny."
I thought of the squalid, horrible place this liquor came from.
He looked at me again with those eyes like an tomcat in the darkness, killed the flashlight, took a long draw, passed it to me. Opaque brown bottle. I raised it and drank; it was whiskey with a faint taste of the smell of rain near factories. I raised it and drank what brought fragile order to its knees, what roared through houses and filled lungs to the brim. tearwater mudwater bloodwater: the flood of the people's funeral. i swallowed until my stomach was hot and my eyes burned. and then when the bottle was empty and r was unconscious as usual, the ghosts came in and we raged in the ruins with me laying down my body and them breathing in their bones from my breath.

Alone in apartment 89

at midnight I closed my eyes on the weary sodium lamp yellowing my cellblock-sized bedroom, falling asleep to the most curious feeling of tiny seeds unfolding under my skin. things were moving, pushing through, there were green thorns splitting my flesh. i had no choice but to tear a hole in my t-shirt between my breasts and let the wildflowers push out of my chest, fragrant and dripping from the bone.
my sole witness, the sodium lamp, just buzzed jealously as i twisted up in the sheets with visions of those dandelions lit by meteors burning across the night up there, way back in my eyelids, on top of some summer mountain.